This one is courtesy of the PETA website.  I also resolve "not to be so hard on myself".  :)

Battery Hen Farm Prosecuted.  yay.

I haven't been around much lately, either here or on the net in general.  That's because I shifted house and my flatmate hasn't set up our internet yet, and I'm surviving with a painfully slow mobile internet connection.  Sigh.

I'll be back sometime... hope all is well in vox-land...  :)

“I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
"There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, "There, she is gone!"
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout;
"Here she comes!"
And that is dying.”

Henry van Dyke

It's two years (and one day) since I said "she is gone" about my mother.  I don't profess to know what happens to our consciousness when we die, or the ultimate truths of this strange universe that we call home, but I hope that someone somewhere said "here she comes" to her. 

I went to a friend's barbeque this evening, and yet again ended up defending my choice to be vegetarian. 

Even as a non-vegetarian this phenomenon bugged me.  Because I would hear other non-vegetarians imply that vegetarians are haughty and antagonistic, but see that it was really "they" (the non-vegetarians that I speak of) who were antagonistic to the point of inciting antagonism as a reaction to their antagonism.  Are you still with me?

It's not that all non-vegetarians are bastards about it.  Some people are very accepting and casual and respectful about other people's choices.  But what the f***ing hell is it with some people who insist on arguing up a storm with a vegetarian just because they can?  Does it not occur to them that a vegetarian at a social event is actually just trying to be social (like everyone else!), and that they didn't actually turn up to said social event in order to be criticised about their moral or ethical or aesthetic choices? 

OK, OK, got that little bit off my chest.  Now I can go to bed.

...having made that (sort of) rant, the odd link never hurt anyone.  (I'll get in first and say that the article is a week old.  I often am a half-step behind the eight ball.  sigh.)

I am not a blogger.  By that I mean that a) I don't really think of this page as a "blog", more just a series of links or comments about things that I find interesting or important (which for some very neatly fits the description of a blog), and also b) even though I don't really spill my guts here on a regular basis, in my sort-of-blogness I prefer to be anonymous.  Which I stupidly thought that I was here. 

Well, I thought that maybe some people that I only know online might find this page, but someone I "really" know mentioned something they read on my vox the other week, and since then I haven't really wanted to write here.

So, anyway, that's the reason for my relative absence, and it shall probably continue for a while.

The Southern Ocean, which we count on to absorb about 50% of all emitted CO2, is absorbing considerably less than we thought.

It's 3:20am and I'm at work.  Sheesh.

Well, actually I was meant to start work at 5am.  But I was so sooo tired, that I felt a bit paranoid I might not wake up when my alarm went off and I couldn't relax enough to get to sleep.  So when I was still awake at 1am I decided that it was pointless trying to get the three possible hours of sleep left available to me, and I dragged myself out of bed and cruised on in to work.  At least this way I'm not going to be late...

AND (this is the part that I like), I can be home again by about 10am to take a nice long nap.  Yay!

Maybe I need to get out more.  :D

Anyway, here's a link to an article about the use of colour (or "color", as it's written in the site, those weird American-English spellings ;) ) in the movie Little Miss Sunshine.

What websites do you visit every day?
Submitted by Chez Michelle.

It's a pretty short list, every so often something creeps onto the list, but at the same time something creeps off it, so there are never more than about half a dozen sites that I go to every day:

Google (my home page)
Flickr
Vox (hmm)
Gmail
Happiness Project
my bank
Bloglines (and by default also whatever news sites interest me from there, usually BBC, Scientific American, Reuters, Science Blog, National Geographic, etc)

Pretty boring list really.